Wow, what a week it’s been.
As web designers, we both help set up websites for clients and also offer them Ladybug, to keep their nice websites up to date. Those are two very important components that work hand in hand – their website, which holds the actual site and all of the images, and Ladybug, which holds the database and functionality to make updates to their sites.
Last weekend, our client noticed some issues with their site. And then it went down. It was down for a few days, in fact, during which time we received little knowledge of the problems. Even after the site was restored, we couldn’t get it to work with Ladybug because the FTP address and other vitals had changed. So after a support ticket, and some back-and-forth, we eventually got that straightened out and their site back up.
The trouble was, their backups were about a week behind. Since Ladybug doesn’t keep all of the source images for the website (we keep those on the client’s website, because they own the images), all of the updates we’d just done were broken. Not good. Once we figured this out it took a bit of work, but we got all those problems fixed.
And then the site that hosts Ladybug, at Joyent, went down, yesterday. Hard. For about 36 hours, in fact, leaving all of our clients quite put out. And when our host was finally brought up, there were a couple of problems there to be dealt with! Not too bad, but it does increase the heart rate a bit, if you know what I mean. We lost the last 12 hours of database updates, which was a big pain for Kandace – she’s re-doing a bunch of work now. But we’ll live.
So we’re leaving town and taking a couple days off. It’s been a long week. Let’s hope things go more smoothly while we’re gone!
(Note: I would still recommend Joyent for hosting. They handle downtime well. I would not recommend the other company, who lost a week of backups, among other issues. They will remain nameless.)
